On 29 July 2023, my movie watch was a very unusual 2016 monster/horror creature feature entitled Day of Reckoning.
Directed by Joel Novia, and screened on TV in 2016 by Syfy, Day of Reckoning begins with a prologue, showing what happened 15 years before this movie's main story.
Namely, tunnelling work deep underground for a mining operation, coupled above-ground with a solar eclipse, had heralded the sudden surfacing worldwide of immense droves of horrific winged and other carnivorous beasts from the infernal subterranean depths of our planet. Moreover, these monsters wreaked such devastation upon its surface and in particular upon humanity until the eclipse ended that this nightmarish 24 hours was dubbed the Day of Reckoning.
Moving now to the present day, another eclipse occurs, and the global horror happens all over again. Yet despite the previous occurrence, civilization seems no more capable of tackling this terrifying scenario than it was before.
The film follows the desperate attempts of one dysfunctional family headed by David Shepperd (Jackson Hurst) to escape the hellish beasts unleashed upon the world and, ultimately, to fight back. Their one hope of salvation is that the creatures, of which there are several different types, including a macabre semi-humanoid variety, can be killed by salt, which dissolves them into a bloody pool of ooze.
For a low-budget TV movie, the CGI creatures in Day of Reckoning are decent, especially the sky-filling hordes of dragon-like winged terrors, and also a monstrous, gigantic centipede-like entity. I also enjoyed the freakish terror bird x feathered velocitaptor lookalikes that were unleashed first during the original tunneling work.
No major-league stars feature in this movie, and all manner of unexplained aspects exist in its plot, such as how an eclipse can even be sensed by creatures that live at least 3000 ft below the surface (the depth at which the original tunneling which disturbed them had occurred), why weren't stores of salt positioned in vast quantities around the chasms from which the creatures emerged during the first Day of Reckoning so as to be ready for dropping into them if these creatures should ever re-emerge (which of course they did, 15 years later), and so forth.
But as with all such movies, it's best not to think too deeply about plotting, just go with the flow, suspend disbelief, and enjoy an interesting, novel twist on the usual monster movie scenario, as I did.
If you'd like to view an official Day of Reckoning trailer on YouTube, please click here.
Finally: to view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.
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